Healing Through Creativity: The Story Behind My Blooming Art Show

For a while now, I’ve felt inspired to host an art show and bring together some of the work I’ve created throughout different seasons of my life. The idea of sharing so much of my art in one place has always excited me, but if I’m being completely transparent, it also takes a lot of courage for me to put this much of myself out there.

Grief has been a huge part of what inspired me to finally do it. After losing my mom, creativity became an even more important outlet for me, and some of the pieces I’ll be sharing were created during the hardest season of my life. Putting that work on display feels incredibly vulnerable, but it also feels meaningful. In a lot of ways, Blooming is a celebration of creativity, but it’s also a dedication to my mom and the art that helped me keep going after losing her.

As I started planning Blooming, I knew I didn’t want the show to focus only on grief or one specific collection. I wanted it to tell the bigger story of my relationship with creativity and how art has continued to show up for me through heartbreak, growth, happiness, uncertainty, grief, and so many different versions of myself.

If you would like to attend Blooming, here are the details:

Sunday, October 18th. Open house 2pm-5pm

The Harbor House

614 High Street Fairport Harbor, OH

How Art Became Such a Big Part of My Life

I actually didn’t paint for the first time until I was a senior in high school. My art teacher noticed how much I loved being in her class and encouraged me to keep creating, even inviting me into the art room during my free periods so I could paint and practice. After high school, painting stayed mostly a hobby until later in my twenties, when I picked it back up while going through a difficult breakup and uncertain time in my life. I found myself through creating again, and that experience completely changed my relationship with art.

When the COVID lockdown happened, I launched my online art shop and began selling prints of the paintings I had created over the previous six months. I also started hosting virtual paint parties, and from there, art slowly became a much bigger part of my life and career. I kept painting, teaching, creating content, and exploring where creativity could take me. Then, in 2023, I started live wedding painting, which eventually grew into my full-time career.

It’s kind of wild to look back and see how something I once considered a hobby has woven itself into nearly every part of my life.

But the part that means the most to me isn’t necessarily that art became my career.

It’s that through every version of my life, I kept coming back to it.

When Creativity Became a Way to Cope With Grief

After losing my mom, my relationship with art changed yet again.

I had already experienced how creativity could help me through uncertainty, anxiety, heartbreak, and change. But grief was different.

There were days when I wasn’t painting because I felt inspired. I was painting because I was devastated and my racing thoughts were taking over.

I started creating flowers over and over again without really planning to. They showed up in my dreams, sketchbooks, and across canvases until my art room was filled with them. Those paintings eventually became Blooming Through Her, a collection created while processing the loss of my mom.

Art couldn’t change what happened… and it couldn’t make grief disappear. But it gave my grief somewhere to exist outside of my own head.

Sometimes healing through creativity meant making something deeply meaningful. Other times, it was laying in bed with my sketchbook and doodling because that was all I had the energy to do.

Both mattered.

And that season made me think even more about all of the other times creativity had quietly done the same thing for me.

You can read more about my flower paintings & goping with grief in this blog article

Painting Flowers to Grieve After Loss: How I Coped with Losing My Mom

The Story Behind My Blooming Art Show

When I began planning this show, I originally thought about focusing heavily on my grief work. That collection is incredibly personal to me, and it represents one of the most significant ways art has helped me through my life.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t the whole story.

Creativity didn’t suddenly become important to me when my mom died.

My creativity had been there all along.

It started in that high school art room, when I was just figuring out how much I loved to paint, and followed me into my twenties when I was heartbroken and trying to find myself again. During lockdown, it gave me the courage to take a chance on my art, eventually leading me to build a creative career I never expected to have.

And then it was there when I was grieving.

So, that’s what Blooming is really about.

It’s not about becoming some final, perfectly healed version of yourself. It’s about continuing to grow, change, experiment, make mistakes, find yourself, lose yourself a little, and find your way back again.

Arastasia.com – A Dedication To My Mom

There’s one last part of this story that feels especially meaningful now.

Long before I knew I would become a professional artist, my mom bought me Arastasia.com as a birthday gift. She believed that someday I would be ready to do something with it, even though neither of us knew exactly what that would look like yet.

Years later, that website became the home for my paintings, my creative work, and eventually the career I built around art.

And now, after losing her, some of the most personal work I’ve ever created lives there too.

There’s something very full-circle about that for me.

Creativity has changed forms so many times throughout my life. What started in a high school art classroom became a hobby, then an outlet during heartbreak, then an online art shop, virtual paint parties, a career, and eventually one of the most important ways I’ve learned to cope with grief.

I don’t know exactly what it will become next, but I think that’s part of the beauty of it.

I just know I want to keep creating.

And if there’s one thing I hope people feel when they walk through Blooming, it’s the desire to keep creating too.

Thanks for reading my love! Remember to stay shining and stay creating! ☀️

sincerely, your artsy friend that is rooting for you-